Colorful Ostara Greetings!
Hello! *peers around hesitantly* What are you fine folks doing to celebrate this week? :-)
In previous years (aside from the usual decluttering and cleaning that this time of year always motivates), I've also experimented with coloring eggs using food-based methods, rather than buying egg-dye kits. I've found I really like the natural colors, especially the blues...
I tried each of these last year with brown and white eggs from my farmers market...
Robin's Egg Blue:
Boil a cup or two of red/purple cabbage in water for a half-hour, then strain out the cabbage bits. The remaining blue water is where you soak already-boiled eggs, overnight in the fridge. The longer the eggs soak, the darker the blue gets.
The brown eggs didn't really work well with this; they turned out rather muddy-looking. The white eggs turned out really beautifully.
Golden Yellow:
Place unboiled eggs in cold water in a pot on the stove, and add tumeric, then boil the eggs.
The brown eggs turned out a golden-tan-brown which was quite pretty. The white eggs turned out a golden yellow. Be careful with this turmeric-water, though, it may stain just about anything.
Green (more or less):
I used the leftover turmeric-water after it had cooled to soak an already-blue boiled egg in overnight in the fridge, to try to get green, and it mostly worked. :-)
Stripey patterns:
I put some wide and narrow rubber bands around a boiled egg before cold-soaking it in a color, and this yielded interesting stripey patterns. Specifically, taking a white boiled egg and soaking it in the blue cabbage-water overnight, then putting on the rubber bands, then soaking it in the cooled-after-boiling turmeric-water for another day gave me a lovely greenish-with-blue-stripes egg.
I meant to try to make pink eggs, thinking that maybe pomegranate juice and/or red tea and/or blood-orange juice might work well, especially since this season I can usually find lovely bold-colored blood-oranges at the farmers market (yay for living in southern California), but I didn't get around to it last year, and I didn't get to the market last weekend. Maybe at Saturday's market...
Has anyone else here experimented with these sorts of egg coloring methods? How did yours turn out?
(And mods, I wasn't sure how to tag this post... help?)